Duty to Warn

Embattled New York Times reporter Judith Miller acted as a "middleman" between an American military unit and the Iraqi National Congress while she was embedded with the U.S. armed forces searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in April 2003, and "took custody" of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, one of 55 most wanted Iraqis, RAW STORY has found.

Moreover, in one of the most highly unusual arrangements between a news organization and the Department of Defense, Miller sat in on the initial debriefing of Jamal Sultan Tikriti, according to a June 25, 2003 article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28385-2003Jun24?language=prin…) published in the Washington Post.

As the New Orleans disaster recedes from the headlines, citizen activists face a choice. We can focus exclusively on other newer issues. Or we can work to make the disaster one of those key turning points with the potential to transform American politics. For this to happen, we need to consciously create new dialogue, reaching well beyond the core converted.

If we think back to the 9/11 attacks, which have shaped American politics ever since, a brief window of critical reflection opened up in their immediate wake. Middle East experts critical of U.S. policies had op-eds in our largest newspapers and appeared on network TV. Ordinary citizens mourned the victims, while asking what would make the attackers so embittered they'd be willing to murder 3,000 innocent people. The next day, when I spoke about possible root causes, with even more frankness than usual, at a community college in the overwhelmingly Republican suburbs just north of Dallas, the response was amazingly receptive.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to determine whether Vice President Dick Cheney had a role in the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson, individuals close to Fitzgerald say. Plame’s husband was a vocal critic of prewar intelligence used by President George W. Bush to build support for the Iraq war.

The investigation into who leaked the officer's name to reporters has now turned toward a little known cabal of administration hawks known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which came together in August 2002 to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. WHIG was founded by Bush chief of staff Andrew Card and operated out of the Vice President’s office.

Fitzgerald’s examination centers on a group of players charged with not only selling the war, but according to sources familiar with the case, to discredit anyone who openly “disagreed with the official Iraq war” story.

Toledo -- More than seventy-five local, state, and national organizations sent a letter today to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the Congressional oversight and appropriations committees for the Department of Defense (DOD), seeking an end to a data collecting project called the Joint Advertising and Market Research Studies (JAMRS) Recruiting Database.

Toledo's Student and Family Rights and Privacy Committee, the group now pressuring Toledo Public Schools to restrict military recruiters, is in full support of this effort to end the JAMRS recruitment database because it violates the Privacy Act while collecting data on 30 million people ages 16 to 25 from a vast array of sources such as drivers license or selective service registrations. Other organizations from the Toledo area that have joined this nationwide effort include the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition, Sylvania Franciscan Sisters, the Interfaith Justice and Peace Center, and the Toledo League of Pissed Off Voters.

If some of its key publications are any indicator, much of the American left seems unable to face the reality that the election of 2004 was stolen. So in all likelihood, unless something radical is done, 2008 will be too.

Misguided and misinformed articles in both TomPaine.com and Mother Jones Magazine indicate a dangerous inability to face the reality that these stolen elections mean nothing less than the death of what's left of American democracy, and the permanent enthronement of the Rovian GOP.

As investigative reporters based in Columbus, Ohio, we witnessed first-hand, up close and personal, exactly how the 2004 election was stolen, and how it will most likely be done in 2008. In the precinct in which Harvey Wasserman grew up, and in the one where Bob Fitrakis now lives, we saw the well-funded, profoundly cynical and deadly effective mechanisms by which the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell GOP machine switched a victory for John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat for democracy.

AUSTIN, Texas -- You can only sit around wringing your hands and moaning about what a mess the Bushies have made of America for so long. Sooner or later, even the gloomiest doom-meisters are bound to get beaned by an acorn on the noggin, leading to the startling and productive thought, "So, what could we do that would make things better?" Quel concept, eh?

For those mired in loathing the Bush administration, the program would start with a long, long list of things that need to be undone: repeal the bankruptcy bill, repeal the tax breaks for the rich, and fix the farm bill, the transportation bill, the energy bill, etc. Or you could start with a list of gentle suggestions, such as:

-- Making a rude jerk with a bad temper ambassador to the United Nations, probably not a good idea
-- Putting a veterinarian in charge of women's health policy, maybe not.
-- Making someone with a background in Arabian horses the disaster-relief czar, possibly needs reconsideration.
-- Invading a Middle Eastern country with no provocation, a country that posed no threat and had no connection to 9-11 ... hmmm, perhaps not a shrewdie.

Once again, an old song acts as muse for Daniel Patrick Welch. Repopularized by a current Volkswagen ad, the Donovan lyric tweaks Welch’s sense of the futility of resistance in the quagmire that is today’s American political landscape. From a personal perspective, the writer describes watching as all his European friends flee one by one, a sort of metaphor for the international rejection of the would-be Pax Americana.

To understand fully the nature of the American dilemma, one has only to view it from slightly outside the bubble. My wife and I have been restricted from foreign travel for various bureaucratic and financial reasons; but our sanity depends on hundreds of connections around the globe for perspective and comfort. The sea change in this perspective from without reveals the utter hopelessness of the U.S. position, and underscores a grave warning to those still willing or able to listen at home.

More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration’s “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: “During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment ‘embedded’ with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.” And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, “I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.”